Don Chatelain

Don Chatelain is a former business owner and entrepreneur, church Bible teacher, Elder in the Presbyterian church, camp ministry developer and retired adjunct seminary instructor as a Protestant Evangelical. Don has an artist wife, Martha, two daughters and two grandchildren.

Moving to Portland in 2005, Don set up a practice in Business Mentoring for owners, presidents, pastors and executive directors of small enterprises. Having run a dozen small to mid-size enterprises, Don says "Most owners appreciate single sourcing of business consulting expertise in one trustworthy person by their side."

Don also offers his services as an interim CEO, where a given small to mid-size company truly needs a mature and skilled "franchise player" to make "course corrections" before a new CEO is hired.

Don's love and research area is first century Protestant Christianity. His Messiah Scrolls Project includes several sub-projects; one of them is the on-line historical novel (April 2010), second edition as of February 2014, The Parable of the Messiah Scrolls, about the followers of Jesus and the creation of the first Christian Community in 74 AD.

A second sub-project, scheduled as a second historical novel, comes from his contemporary research using what was learned from research into the first Christian community. Prefigured some 2000 years later, the second novel introduces the status of current Apostolic Authority within formation of the modern day Megachurch; scheduled for on-line publishing in late 2015.

Over the past 20 years Don has worked as an observer, teacher, missional program innovator, friend and consultant to megachurches, many of whom he believes have a special place in God's plan.

Parable of The Messiah Scrolls

This online historical novel, built around early Christian biblical texts, is a epic/thriller, revealing the actual disciple followers of Jesus near the end of the first century AD; for the first time, revealing the untold, back story to the actual, sunken, geographic site of Rhakotis (near Alexandria), the original Christian community zero.

Most of the geographic and biblical research as well as the main characters are from the Old and New Testaments, their lives, on the basis of unpublished manuscripts, necessarily fictionally extended. Ten to twelve, non-disciple, yet very colorful Jesus followers, key to the story (each character having maybe one or two mentions in scripture), are also necessarily fictionally constructed to complete the leadership team of the first Christian community. Having said this; still to the ancient scholar or modern layperson, this group would have to be considered “rag tag” when compared to the power and depth of their Roman or Hebrew Priest oppressors in the fertile crescent.

The novel's organizing question is, "How did ten to twelve rag-tag apostles and their cult leader, Jesus, not only stand down the Roman Empire but, by 74 AD, build two hundred Messiah Communities that eventually established Christianity as the dominant personal, social, cultural and literary force for the next two thousand years?"

In other words, the goal of the full Messiah Scrolls novel is to show in a single biblically extended historical narrative the formation and stunningly epic growth of the original Christian community; with following implications for our modern day: